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BEACHCOMBER WOMAN
ALONG MEDITERRANEAN




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LITTLE EDITH
FALLS ASLEEP




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THE COAST IN
SOUTHWEST FRANCE





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WE SLEEP OUT ON
MEDITERRANEAN BEACH

My Story

#23

SCENE: Europe/Africa
TIME: Mid-20th Century

“It looks almost like an ocean out there!” I shouted to Rudi as we sped along the southern coastline of France.
I looked, and for a moment thought I saw Africa on the other side. “And one day, we will get to Africa and look back across the Mediterranean and see Europe,” I thought, “Where I am right now.” If we can get to Africa, I will look back to this side, remembering all our good times in France: Toby, the crazy pot party, Lily, the songfest under the bridge, the Paris caves, Mr. Blanchard’s wine, Mr. Rouge’s farm, and others I haven’t mentioned like little Edith. On her parent’s farm as Rudi and I talked with her parents after supper, little 5-year- old, Edith, who fell asleep trying to keep awake past her bedtime to listen to her American and German visitors.

Traveling along the Mediterranean reminded me of Ocean City, Maryland, my home town, where a walk on the beach meant a broad expanse of fine white sand. We found a stretch of it our first night out camping. But another night it was a pebbly beach where I snapped a picture of a lone woman scavenging for whatever the Mediterranean waves would offer her.

Beachcombing is an art, I suppose, all over the world. Whenever a nor’easter with a 40-mile an hour wind passed through our town, those of us kids who were beachcombers would be out on the surfside the next day looking for stuff. One kid had a coin finder, I usually brought along a magnifying glass. We searched the water’s edge for interesting objects that the ocean would give up after a big storm.
During the war some days it was a tacky job because whenever a German U-boat sank an American tanker offshore, oil from the sunken tanker would wash ashore and for about a week the beach would be left with a black coat of seaweed covered with what we called sticky “Tar”. My mother would make us wash our feet with kerosene before we were allowed back in the house. By the way, she was a volunteer during the war for the WCCGAAP, I think they called it, the Women’s Civilian Coast Guard Auxiliary Air Patrol. Her job was to sit high up in the pillbox in the sand dunes up the beach north of town from 3pm to 5pm and watch for suspicious activity out on the ocean. There were only 950 people living in Ocean City during the winter time back then, so the U.S. Air Force was grateful for people like Muzzie, that’s what we called her, to go up there and volunteer.

People are still finding stuff along the beach. One time even a body washed up and a coin from a Spanish galleon. There has been debris that washed ashore from sunken German U-boats, crashed airplanes, and exotic seashells from the ocean bottom. One time, and this was when I was younger, I was walking the shore with my mother, I guess I was 9-10 yrs old, I picked something up and Muzzie suddenly screamed right there in public with sunbathers all around and said “Put that down! Drop I! Don’t touch it!” I had thought it was some kind of jellyfish. It looked like a colorless balloon. I wanted to blow it up. It was a condom.

The U.S. Coast Guard concrete pillbox on the sand dunes north of town stayed up there all alone long after the war until land developers realized the real estate potential of the ocean front and Ocean City became a vacation spot for people from Baltimore and Washington. The wheeler-dealers took over and that’s when the town lost it.
Back to France. Rudi and I camped out along the beach that night, and in the morning, headed toward the looming foothills of the Pyrenees off in the distance. Perpignan was a friendly town with the influence of Spain and Arabic-looking people. We probably were following the trail of the Romans to Spain, and the back and forth movement over the centuries of Arabs, Jews, and French who were either making an exodus, conquering something, getting kicked out or just trying to find a place to settled down, and all squeezed between the great mountains on the north and the sea on the south. It left a feisty mix of people and we were feeling it.
We visited the local newspaper office in Perpignan and one of the reporters gave us his advice about going to Spain.
Don’t. “There’s another Hitler over there,” He said.
Well, there was no way we were going to get to Morocco if we didn’t go through Spain. His advice didn’t dissuade us.

On the road again the next day. We entered Spain by La Junquera. At the border, the Spanish customs officers were all dressed in fancy government uniforms, like they were on a movie set. If we both hadn’t been carrying guitars on our motor scooter, I bet they would have dickered with us for a couple hours, what with us looking like a couple of drifters.

Although the landscape of southern France was a gradual change, I felt an almost sudden change in the people. I was expecting strikingly beautiful girls, guitars, castanets and stomping heels, and hopefully not the kind of boot clicking from storm troopers.

Maybe the newspaper reporter back in Perpignan was right.
We drove toward Barcelona, the Spanish port with a history of Roman roads and Gothic architecture. As we sped along the rolling hills lined with stubby cork trees, and olive groves we shouted out our first impressions to each other in the onrushing wind.
“Where’s all the traffic?” Rudi shouted. “This road has no cars on it, no traffic, it’s like an airplane runway!
“Yeah. I’ve only seen a couple military trucks and a tourist!” Civilization ended at the border. I shouted back to him above the wind.
It was weird, it was like the towns and the countryside, someone had sounded an air raid alarm and everyone was in the shelters.
Later we learned there are no air raid shelters, it’s just that it was siesta time in Spain, and from around noon to 2 or 3 o’clock you just don’t try or do anything outside, it’s too hot.
Each little village we passed through had a village square and a traffic policeman stationed there. Why, I don’t know because there was no traffic. The policeman would stand in all that heat in his round traffic podium and waved when we drove by. Then probably returned to sleep under his large canvas shade umbrella.
Later in the afternoon, along the roadsides and in the little towns, the people waved and shouted with the frenzy of a political rally when they would spot the guitar strapped to the front of our scooter.
“They’re really friendly people!” Rudi shouted up to me.
I shouted back, “Yeah! Look at them wave!” and we both waved back to a group of shouting men who were sitting on a roadside embankment.
It was now the middle of June, and the countryside was getting bleached by the sizzling Spanish sun. Everything seemed defined in tones of black and white.
As we drove by a small water well in one of the small villages, a group of men yelled to us. “Guitar! Guitar!” We interpreted this as a sign of warm-blooded Latin friendliness and pulled the scooter around the village square to have a drink of water.
“Buenos Dias!” we greeted them. “Do you have a drink of water for us?” Rudi greeted the small group of local peasants.

They just stared as though we hadn’t said a thing. We didn’t know what to say. “Agua, Agua!” Rudi made a sign of drinking a glass of water and pointed to the well in case they hadn’t understood his Spanish. They just kept staring at us. I looked around to see if we had pulled up to the same men that had been shouting to us. Sure, enough they were, but they didn’t seem so hospitable anymore. What happened? They started retreating behind each other like a slow motion game of musical chairs until only the curious infants remained to answer us.
“What da hell was that?” I looked at Rudi.
“Maybe the water’s bad, and they’re ashamed to give us some.”
“Or maybe they’re not allowed to use the wells this time of day.”
It was like when we were kids when you’re watching a Saturday afternoon movie at the matinee and you shout along with everybody else at the bad guy when he guns down the hero. You never expect him to come out of the screen, jump down off the stage and point his gun at you.
We represented the movie flick and they never expected we would stop and talk with them. They didn’t know how to react.

Whatever it was, we didn’t get any water at that well, and we took off, looking for another one. “Guitar! Guitar! I heard a man shouting from a horse cart as we passed him, and I wondered just what he meant by that!
We pulled up to a well in the next village where some old women were filling jugs from the village well water.
“O.K. to take some water?” I motioned, hoping they would understand what I meant. She quietly handed me a small jug, and Rudi and I filled our canteen and ourselves and then handed it back to her. “Thank you, ma’am.”
She said suspiciously, “De nada.”
“It’s probably only in this area they’re like this,” Rudi reckoned as we got back on the scooter and headed for Barcelona.
We arrived in Barcelona in late afternoon, and had a meal of fish rouget and garlic in a small harbor café. As we were finishing our meal, and elderly man in a black European suit greeted us from the other end of the café.
“That your scooter out there?” he spoke to us in German.
“Hello!” We said as he came over to talk with us at our table. “Yes, it’s our scooter. We’re on a world tour.”
“Well I’m on a tour, too! Oh, by the way, my name’s Hans Von Musser.” He wore a German sea cap, and looked like captain Ahab himself all dressed up. We introduced ourselves, and then he went on to tell us he was touring the ports of Europe in a one-mastered ketch he had built. “Yes, built that thing all by ourselves, me and my friend. Took us two years in Hamburg to do it, too.”
“Is your friend with you on the tour, too?” I asked.
“No, he couldn’t make it, left me to make the trip all by myself -it’s a pity, too; I have an unused room on the boat.”
“Are you married?” Rudi asked rather indiscriminately.
“That’s being mighty inquisitive, son!” He snapped, turning to Rudi.
“Can you handle that boat all by yourself?” I asked.
“Almost a year now. I hit ‘em all on the way down, Rotterdam, Le Havre, Brest, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Santander, Lisbon, Gibraltar, and now Barcelona. I’ve been selling articles about my trip to newspapers in all the cities I visit, but the cheap bastards here in Barcelona won’t give me a cent, so I won’t give them a thing, either!”
“They pay for the stories?” I asked. I had sent my newspaper articles to the Baltimore SUN and hoped to hear a “Yes” from the captain. It would give me encouragement until we reached Madrid where we would learn an answer by return mail.
“Sure, most of them give you enough money that’ll cover the cost of gasoline until the next port.”
“But why don’t you just give the editor in Barcelona the article, even though they won’t buy it?” I suggested to him.
“Why in the hell would I want to do that?... Are you crazy?”
“Well, I’d think the more articles you come in with to a newspaper editor; the more important you would look to them. When you got to the next city, you wouldn’t have to mention some of the previous city newspapers didn’t pay you.”
I pointed to my trip book to show him how Rudi and I had stopped in local newspapers all through Europe, telling them about our trip. They usually wrote a story and took a picture of us. Local people would see the article and strike up a conversation and often we would be invited into a home for a meal or lodging. And also how I would paste in there other photographs and autographs of people we had met. I thought the captain would be interested in the idea.
“Not me, sonny!” he said, laying my book down without even opening it. “They’re not gonna get a word outta me unless they pay for it!” He was perturbed that I suggest he give his writings away for nothing.
I tried to direct the conversation to a less controversial subject, like talking about how he made the usual repairs and upkeep for his boat, but he was an irritable man. The status quo was lost. I thought of those nice warm cots in his extra room on the ketch when he finally stood up, gave us each a silent salute, and walked out of the café.
“There goes our invitation for the night,” I looked over at Rudi.
“He probably wasn’t even a sea captain. He probably didn’t even have a boat,” Rudi mumbled.
I looked out the door of the café. It had become dark. “Well, it looks like we’re gonna stay in the city tonight,” I said, wondering what kind of accommodation we’d finally end up with that night.
“Let’s go down to the harbor, maybe we’ll find another German ship!” Rudi said.
We rode through the dim lights and fog of the Barcelona harbor. We didn’t find a German ship, but did come up on a high stack of hundreds of empty wooden fish crates, where we found an empty space to lay out our sleeping bags atop a few burlap bags. The sound of sea gulls and foghorns lulled us to sleep.
In the middle of the night Rudi shook me and hollered, “It’s starting to rain!” He got up and unpacked the tent from the scooter. He spread it over top of our sleeping bags and we crawled under the tent canvas and covered ourselves from the rain. We went to sleep dry and soundly until six o’clock the next morning when the noise of women’s voices woke us up.
Rudi was the first to say anything. “We got some visitors?”
It was dark underneath the tent canvas, and we had no idea what time it was. There was still a slight drizzle from the rain, and it puzzled us why we would hear women’s voices out in the middle of all those fish crates. And especially since we didn’t yet realize it was early in the morning.
“I’ll take a peek,” I said answered cautiously.
I slowly lifted an edge of the canvas tent cover. The contrasting early morning light burst into my eyes, and with the complication of the rain, I thought I still might be dreaming. I blinked several times until my eyes grew accustomed to the light. There I saw scurrying around our little camping site, scores of women in shawls and long black aprons. Like longshoremen they were lugging big crates filled with fresh fish to the wooden tables that they had set up in the area. They didn’t seem to have noticed us. Maybe they thought there was some fishing netting or something that belong to a fisherman under our canvas tarp.
The mountain of crates had disappeared; we had set up our camping site in the center of the Barcelona fish market!
“We gotta get outta here!” I whispered to Rudi.
“What happened? What’s out there?”
“A fish market!”
“What?” And he whipped the tent back to see for himself.
Some of the women saw us trying to put our clothes on underneath the tent canvas and their giggles attracted half of the fishmongers, traders, brokers and customers in the market to watch us. With the rainfall and how we were feeling, it took us only a short while to pack everything and leave. I looked back to see some of them waving handkerchiefs, and others quickly filling up our campsite with tables.
We headed down the harbor street to a distance we felt the news of our fish market escapade wouldn’t reach and pulled up to a corner lunch stand.
“How about some breakfast?”
“I’m starved!” Rudi answered as we entered and sat in a corner of the two-tabled restaurant.

NEXT:

On to Madrid